Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Nadella's karma

I wanted to share this article from my friend Steve McCaa about Nadella's karma.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella aims to position Microsoft as the "tools provider" for new business. But as McCaa correctly points out, the future of business software is not going to be on the desktop; it's going to be in the Cloud, as Software as a Service (SaaS). There's the rub. From McCaa's article:

Take a look at the technologies that are coming out to develop web services, the life blood of SaaS. The most innovative, cool technologies are all *NIX first. NoSQL, Node.JS, Ruby, Python in all these cases Microsoft had to bribe the open-source community to port their products to the Windows platform. And even then Microsoft’s developer tools don't support these technologies.

(emphasis mine)

Microsoft feared in the 1990s that the Web would eventually displace the desktop. If you haven't accepted the conclusion yet: Cloud is the future—and as Microsoft feared, the browser is the new platform, not the operating system. It no longer matters if you're using Windows, Mac, Linux, or some other thing, as long as you have a standards-compliant web browser. Microsoft needs to shift gears quickly to remain competitive. McCaa concludes, "When I see Microsoft releasing tools that are designed to enable the interface between SaaS providers who they compete with I will believe that they might have a future in enterprise computing."